A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun

Share

A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun

This talk is from WIRED by Design, a two-day live magazine event that celebrated all forms of creative problem solving.

From Mary Poppins, we've learned that sugar helps medicine go down. The idea is that the unenjoyable parts of life can be rendered fun with the addition of a little sweet something extra. As game designer and theorist Ian Bogost sees it, Poppins has been peddling bunk.

At WIRED by Design, Bogost outlined his conception of fun. It's not about effortless enjoyment, he argues, but instead about embracing the effort demanded in a given situation. If you're mowing your lawn, you don't make it fun by strapping an iPad to your lawnmower. Instead, you make it fun by taking the job seriously—you see how few rows you can take to cover the whole yard, how tightly you can make the turns.

"Fun is giving respect to something that doesn't deserve it," Bogost says. "Becoming infatuated with something for which infatuation seems impossible." If you're unconvinced, just think about golf. It's a ridiculous premise and the source of untold frustration. And yet, after all these centuries, we're still going back to the links.